Phew!  The Halloween excitement is over for 1-B!  Thank you to Rafe’ Shearer, our room mom, for organizing a great party!  Thank you as well to our other parents who helped make the party a great success!

We did actually get some work done today!  We enjoyed spending time with our book buddies.  The fifth graders recieved book marks today that give them strategies for helping their first grade buddies when they get stuck on a word.  It was fun watching them interacting!

We completed our work on How and why do I make a prediction?  See if your child can answer that question.  (How- I use background knowledge and literary elements such as the characters and the problem.  Why- To help me understand the story)

Have a wonderful weekend!  Don’t forget to turn back those clocks!

We celebrated Chase’s birthday with yummy cupcakes today!  Thanks Chase and Happy Birthday!

Have you heard the caterpillars are pupas now?  Tomorrow they will be ready to place in the netting so that we can await the arrival of the butterflies!

Tomorrow is picture day!  Please send in your picture envelope tomorrow!

There will be no homework tomorrow so that you have one less thing to worry about with the excitement of  Trick-or-Treat night!  I can hardly wait to see the kiddos in their costumes Friday afternoon!

Have a great evening!

Happy Monday everyone!  We had four students absent today!  I hope everyone is feeling better and will be back soon!  In the meantime, we are using the tissues and hand sanitizer like crazy hoping to keep healthy!

We continued with our work on predicting by using the story elements to help us.  Today we focused on how the problem in the story could help us predict what would happen next.  We read a Franklin story about learning to ride his bike.  We had all kinds of predictions based on our background knowledge and experiences with learning to ride ourselves!

We began a unit on patterns in math.  We learned that the pattern must repeat twice for it to actually be a pattern.  You’ll be looking for patterns around your house tonight.  Have you ever noticed that math is all about patterns?

We talked about “Alcoholism” in Health class today.  We stressed that just because you see a parent have an occasional “drink” does not mean a person is an alcoholic!  We also discussed that talking about problems that you see your loved ones having is a great way to keep a small problem from becoming a big one!  We also stressed that alcohol is not a drink for children.  Tough topics in health class!

Have a wonderful evening!  Enjoy the lovely weather!

Happy Friday!  Officer Curtis was here today to talk to us about Halloween safety.  Because he was here during our normal center time, we weren’t able to have centers today.  Instead, we did some follow-up  activities based on the books children are reading in their reading groups.  We made a fruit smoothie following directions from one of our books.  We also made star gazers following directions from another book.  It was a lot of fun!

During writing today we practiced our revising skills by looking at our former journal entries and adding or deleting information.

We finished our unit 2 math testing today.  Everyone did a great job!

Congratulations to Adrien, our social skill student of the week.  He is great with conversations!

Jason was a student of the week.  He wants to race cars when he grows up!

Next Friday is our school’s parade and party.  Mrs. Shearer, Max’s mom, sent home a form for helping with the party.  The parade will begin at 1:15.  We’re looking forward to a great time!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Tomorrow is Crazy Hair Day!  I told the children their hair could be crazy, but their behavior could not!    Ha, ha!  I can hardly wait to see all the crazy do’s!

We enjoyed reading with our book buddies again today.  It is really neat to see the age groups interacting with one another!

Today we wrote about our characters “Matt” and “Elly” and what they would do in the settings we made for them.  We then took turns predicting what each other had written.  It was fun to see how our background knowledge really helped us understand a story!

The caterpillars are getting really fat and the mealworms are shedding skin!  What awesome observations our first graders are making!  This has been a fun science unit!

Enjoy this beautiful weather!

The mealworms are here!  We were thrilled to see not only larva, but pupas as well!  Today we made homes for them and provided them with the things they need to live (food-oats; water-apples; air, and shelter-a plastic tub).  We recorded our first obervations in our scientific note books as well!

We enjoyed our trip to the public library today.  Thank you to Mrs. Dovenspike for coming along with us.

We began our unit 2 math test today.  It takes two days to complete because there is a written part and an oral part.  So far so good!! 

Friday is Crazy Hair Day!  I can hardly wait to see that!

Enjoy this wonderful weather!

I am so sorry we had to cancel the Reading Program Tonight.  I apologize  for the inconvenience it may have caused anyone.  Miss Sior and I both  have packets that we would be happy to share with you.  Please let me know if you would like one.

The first grade teachers were in a meeting this afternoon, so I was not in the room after lunch.  Sounds like everything went o.k. though! 

This morning we drew detailed pictures of our caterpillars in our Butterfly logs.  We are having fun being scientists!  We should get our first look at the mealworms tomorrow!

We also worked on revising our rough drafts this morning.  This is not an easy process for first graders.  I mean really, do we as adults like to revise our work?  Imagine 6 and 7 year olds looking critically at their work!  I was so impressed with the kiddos!  They really did well trying to make their writing more interesting!  We will continue to practice this skill all year.

Enjoy your evening!

It was nice to enjoy outside recess today! 

We talked about using characters and setting to help us make predictions.  The children worked in pairs to make different settings for our characters “Matt” and “Elly”.  Tomorrow we will predict what each character will do in the different settings based on our background knowledge.

In writing,  our puppet Wraggles asked us to help him make his story better.  We learned that we could add or delete things to make our story more interesting.  We also learned to double check for signal words.  Tomorrow we will revise our own stories.

In math,  we played bowling with a mini ball and pins to learn how to write subtraction number models.

We made little science logs today so we draw pictures and record our observations of our insects.  The caterpillars really grew over the weekend!  They are probably double in size!

Please note that the Reading Program offered tomorrow night has been cancelled.  We had only 2 RSVPs as of this afternoon.

Have a wonderful evening!

It was a rainy indoor recess day again!  We still managed to get a lot done.  

We continued working on predicting today.  The students worked in pairs and talked about their background knowledge related to different jobs.  Then we read a book together to see if our predictions related to the story were correct.

We wrote the endings of our rough drafts today.  Next week we will begin to revise the stories as we continue with the writing process.

We played nickel-exchange in math.  We are really good at counting by 5′s and then by 1′s.

Kaleb was our social skill star of the week.  He did a great job introducing himself to others.  Way to go Kaleb.

Grace was our student of the week.  She wants to be a chef when she grows up!  Yum!! 

Have an awesome weekend!

We are drafting our Personal Narratives and are they ever great!  So far we have written the beginning and the middle.  As a step up from our Kindergarten writing, we are using an opening sentence and signal words such as first and next to make our story easier to read.  Ask your child what she/he is writing about!

We practiced how to get our new  word work homework ready.   Starting next Monday, your child will bring home a word work book on Monday and Wednesday evenings.  There are directions on the cover for how to complete the work.  Your child will have glued in the new list of words before it comes home each week.

We had fun telling number stories in math today.  We wrote number models to go with our stories.  See if your child can tell you what a number model is (example: 4 + 2 = 6).

Have a nice evening!